What I'm Reading

Answers

This afternoon, actor Heath Ledger was found dead of an apparent drug overdose in the apartment of Mary Kate-Olsen, a known GOP operative. I wouldn't be surprised if George Bush's name was on the prescription labels, too. It all goes back to the religious right's backlash against Brokeback Mountain and the seething hatred all conservatives have for same-sex couples. Whether it's Ledger/Gylellynyhal, or Kerry/Edwards, Bush just can't stand the thought of two men being madly in love with one another.

The Shrub swaggered into town to do a little campaigning last week. You heard me right: campaigning! You'd think that with all his overpaid advisors, at least one of them would tell the moron that he only gets two 4-year terms, stolen or not. But then again, the chimp was never really a fan of the Constitution. It's just a stupid piece of paper to him.

You can therefore wager your left testicle that I was one of the many progressives out there exercising our free speech rights by pelting the peeResident's motorcade with rancid tomatoes*. I'm pretty I sure didn't see any of YOU guys, as liberal as you claim to be. All I saw were the jackbooted SS thugs who accosted me in the bus station restroom. There I sat, rockin' to some tunes on my iPod when two of them kicked down the stall door and jammed their Smith & Wesson phalluses into my face.

"Yeah," said the other. "He's listening to the Dixie Chicks! GET HIM!"

So I either spent the entire week locked up at Gitmo, or I got a hold of some bad shrooms at my Aunt Gertrude's lesbian wedding and hallucinated the whole thing.

Anyhoo, I got back today to find out that Bush had Luciano Pavarotti murdered while I was conventiently out of town. It's a shame. I caught a Pavarotti show in 1996 and it was the best sleep I ever had. Once Bush gets rid of the other two tenors, insomniacs all over the world will have no choice but to turn to the pharmaceutical companies for a cure. That's money right into the GOP coffers. So thanks to the Shrub, it'll literally be Nessun Dorma in the Chomstein household well past election day.

*Grown locally and harvested by undocumented migrants, for the sake of our children.

History will remember him as a brutal dictator and a mass murderer responsible for countless crimes against humanity. Yet he spent last night kicking back on his Crawford ranch while an innocent man was led to the gallows.

Don’t get me wrong, Saddam was a bad guy, but* his gassing of an entire Kurdish village was no different than U.S. troops killing innocent cilivians on the field of battle. Saddam’s inhuman practice of torturing his own people isn’t any worse than Lyndie England making pig piles out of naked Iraqis on Bush’s orders. According to the sacred laws of Moral Equivilency written in cuniform by ancient Druidic Sissies and passed down through the generations to modern day progressives, Saddam and Bush are exactly the same right down to the identical skid marks on their underoos.

No one can argue that Saddam deserved to be punished for giving Bush an excuse to expand U.S. hegemony. But just as Rev. Merle Haggard’s gay sex romps cleansed all homosexuals of their sins, Bush’s hypocrisy has exonerated Hussein of any guilt for the crimes he committed. By all rights, Saddam should have been freed the moment they pulled him out of that spider hole. Instead, he was forced through a long circus trial and then executed in the dead of night before any Hollywood celebrities could appeal for his release.

So the flags will fly at half-mast Tuesday not for the passing of an American president, but for the death of justice and the tragic loss of a potential University of Colorado professor.

*The phrase “Saddam was a bad guy, but” is a registered trademark of the Democratic National Committee. All Rights Reserved.

OH MY GODDESS, HE’S DONE IT AGAIN!” I screamed hysterically. ‘BUSH HAS FLOWN ANOTHER PLANE INTO A BUILDING!”

“No, no, no, Professym Chomstein!” one of my students calmly interrupted, “It was Corey Lidle, a pitcher for the Yankees.”

“OH MY GODDESS!” I screamed. “BUSH IS KILLING OFF THE NEW YORK YANKEES!!”

I waited a moment for the cheers and applause to die down and then shot an angry glare across the classroom. My students have shown remarkable spiritual growth since I started teaching Midget Studies and the Kama Sutra 101 at Evergreen State College, yet I often find myself amazed by their insensitivity.

Poor Hill. As a Yankees fan, the news of Lidle’s mysterious death must have hit her especially hard - although it wasn’t all that much of a mystery when you consider the time of the whole thing. The Bush Junta obviously needed another Reichstag Fire to draw the nation’s eyes away from his failed North Korea policy, not to mention the recent MoveOn.org study which estimated that the Shrub has killed over 600,000 professional baseball players either indirectly or with his own two hands since declaring “Mission Accomplished” aboard an aircraft carrier in May of 2003. Breaking the heart of his arch-nemesis and crippling her on the eve of the November elections is the veritible icing on Bush's fascist cake.

As a girl growing up on the mean streets of Brooklyn, Hillary spent many a weekend at Yankee Stadium with her father, wildly cheering every single touchdown the Yanks made. She carried her love for the team into college, much to the disdain of her progressive peers. While her friends were burning their bras and dropping acid in protest of the Vietnam War, Hillary was holed up in her dorm room, pleasuring herself to a Joe Pepitone rookie card.

Her accession to the throne didn’t hinder Hillary’s devotion to the Yanks, either. While other First Ladies fussed over new wallpaper and China patterns, Hillary spent her tenure at the White House plastering the walls with Yankees pennants and memorabilia. And despite her presidential duties, she never missed a home game. Like a true Yankee fan, she would often wait outside the ballpark after the game hoping to get an autograph from one of the players. Sometimes, she would follow one home, leaving a dead bird or small rodent on their doormat as a token of her appreciation. There aren’t many “Yankee Fans” who will do that. So when Bush killed Cory Lidle yesterday, he killed a part of Hillary, too.

"...The President has described Ken Lay as an acquaintance, and many of the President's acquaintances have passed on during his time in office,” Reich Propaganda Minister Tony Snow confessed to reporters yesterday.

Gosh, Tony. Thanks for telling us what we’ve all known for six long years: Dumbya’s friendship is hazardous to your health. Even serving as the best man at the Shrub's wedding wasn't enough to keep Kenny-Boy's corpse off Bush's ever-growing mountain of dead "acquaintances". Now lawmakers fear that Lay’s death may be a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, and that he’ll never serve a single day of his sentence. The millions of Americans he bilked out of their retirement savings won’t have it so lucky. Their golden years will be spent eating dog food right out of the can and accidentally voting for Pat Buchanan. Dammit, they deserve better!

As compassionate as it sounds, granting Death With Dignity to every one of Lay’s victims would only be a temporary fix. While the actions of Stalin and Pol Pot were merely unfortunate perversions of Karl Marx’s great utopian dream, Lay’s crimes were typical of capitalism as a whole. It will require tougher, more permanent measures to protect hard-working Americans from another Enron.

The Estate Tax was created to prevent greedy rich people from using the Death Loophole to avoid Giving Back to the Community their ill-gotten wealth. The same principle could be used to insure that corporate fat cats don’t kick the bucket before they can pay for their white-collar crimes against humanity. By law, every new CEO should be required to serve 15 years in a maximum security prison prior to beginning their lucrative career. The sentence could be offset by donating a large portion of their profits to progressive causes, labor unions, or directly to the Democrat Party.

Kenny-Boy Lay may have weaseled out of paying for his crimes, but with a little preventative medicine we can insure that no more CEOs use death as an escape. Once the scourge of capitalism can no longer sap away our precious bodily fluids, our great, great grandchildren will never again worry about how they're ever going to pay for that abortion

When 12 miners died in a West Virginia coal mine “accident” last week, I thought it would be best to wait until the bodies were cold before writing about Bush’s obvious complicity in the disaster. For that, I sincerely apologize. Respectful silence for the dead will never restore Democrats to power, nor will it get my membership to DemocraticUnderground reinstated.

Minutes before the last miner took his last gasp of air, the astute folks at DU had already concluded that the Sago mine explosion was caused by Bush’s easing of mining safety regulations. Moreover, fatal levels of carbon monoxide are not a byproduct of “combustion” as the mainstream media wants us to believe, but of Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest 1% of Americans.

As usual, though, DemocraticUnderground merely scratches the surface. A quick visit to the West Virginia Mining Safety website reveals that “accidents” have been occurring in and around coal mines for years, well before Bush relaxed safety standards. Even with the tough, rigorous regulations firmly in place when Clinton was in office, Bush still found a way to kill 28 miners in the late 1990’s.

So the problem is not mining “safety”, but rather mining “security”. While the Department of Homeland Security goons have been busy opening our mail and listening in on the phone calls of paraplegic shoe salesmen in Walla Walla, the terrorists in the White House have been killing off innocent mine workers unabated.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that Bush carried out these murders himself. The chimp can’t even eat a pretzel without knocking himself unconscious. But I find it odd that of all the letters that were supposedly written by miners in their final hours, most have never been released to the public. Why not? What are they hiding? Certainly, if one of the Sago Mine victims saw Karl Rove skulking around in the shadows prior to the explosion, he would have jotted it down. Perhaps that’s the real reason these poor men had to die - and if the progressive brain trust at DemocraticUnderground doesn’t pick up that ball and run with it soon, people are apt to stop taking them seriously.

When I heard last week that a San Francisco woman had been arrested for throwing her three children off a pier and watching them drown, my first instinct was to jump out of my bean bag chair and cry "WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO A WOMAN'S RIGHT TO CHOOSE?" But then I was suddenly overcome by a traumatic childhood memory of my father tossing me into the river in a primitive attempt at teaching me how to swim. After the rescue team plucked me from the bottom of the falls and untied the trailer hitch from my neck, I swore I'd never go near the water again - not even to bathe. Thirty years and 450 gallons of patchouli later, I sense the same frightening swimming instruction technique being revived, and it threatens to become an epidemic.

Like Susan Smith and Andrea Yates before her, LaShaun Harris has already been tried and found guilty in the court of public opinion. In their simplistic, black and white worldview, many have branded the mothers as "criminals" while cloaking the kids in a cozy blanket of victimhood status. But perhaps it's the mothers themselves who are the victims - victims of a society where we can afford to give tax cuts to the wealthiest one percent of Americans, but not teach our own children the basics of water survival, a skill they'll certainly need once global warming has melted all the ice caps.

Sadly, tragic events like those we witnessed in San Francisco are destined to reoccur. When Bush cut funding to the YMCA in order to finance his illegal and immoral war on terror, hundreds of swimming programs were slashed and public pools closed, condemning thousands of children to the same fate as the Harris kids.

I look forward to a day when desperate mothers won't have to toss their tots off piers to teach them to swim. If they feel the need to do so anyway, the kids will be able to simply doggie-paddle back to shore and enjoy long lives of sexual fulfillment and union representation.

We need not concern ourselves with how or why Bush killed our beloved Andrea Dworkin. If he didn't murder her with his own hands, then the mere existence of the soft, dangly collection of objects in his trousers was sufficient to sap away her feminine juju until she was nothing but an empty husk.

To those of us who loved her, Andrea was both enigmatic and complex. Yet despite her divine brilliance, she led a simple, unpretentious life, devoting herself to an ordinary daily routine. Just like everyone else, she'd get up early, brush the tangles out of her long, flowing armpit hair, dress like an insane street person, and then spend the day desperately trying to survive in a male-dominated world where the subjugation of womyn has become the accepted norm.

As she'd step out of her Washington, DC flat each morning, she'd often pass some devoted grrl fans camped out on the front steps. Some would follow her as she walked along, a small entourage of shaved heads, combat boots, and permanent sneers trailing behind her like militant lesbian ducklings.

Andrea preferred to travel by foot, for buses were built by men, maintained by men, and driven by men. Mass transportation was nothing more than another means for men to assert their dominance over womyn. Sometimes, when she was feeling especially frisky, she enjoyed stepping onto a bus, then stepping off again, then getting back on and off repeatedly until the driver complained. "HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE PENETRATED?" she'd scream at him. "HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE THE RAPED INSTEAD OF THE RAPIST?"

Last Saturday morning, Pope John Paul II was suddenly and mysteriously struck down in the prime of his life. Exactly how Bush did it is unclear, but his motives are as obvious as Jocelyn Wildenstein in a roomful of teen beauty queens. The Pope was an outspoken critic of Bush's illegal and immoral War on Terror, and publicly blasted the Shrub for his Hitleresque junta on more than one occasion. Even more infuriating to Bush was the Pope's faltering stance on so-called "moral issues". While he was oft criticized for being too morally inflexible, there were whisperings amongst the Oompa Loompas that the Pope was preparing to finally bring the Church out of the moral dark ages and modernize the definition of "sin" to be more compatible with Bill Clinton's philosophy. Rumors that the Pope had been frequenting Vatican-area gay discos were written off as blatant attempts to woo Madonna back into the fold, but they might also have been signs that he was close to easing the Church's draconian rules against sexual deviancy. Although wild gay sex orgies are commonplace in the White House, Bush's evangelical masters would certainly not tolerate such dissention in the ranks. However, if the Pope left spme sort of will specifying his desire to modernize the church, he may well have the last laugh from beyond the grave. Pope John Paul II, Bush 0.

Another more plausible motive can be found in the postponement of Prince Charles' wedding. Bush and Queen Elizabeth are distant cousins, and he stands a good chance of inheriting the throne if everyone in the United Kingdom died in a plane crash. Yet despite the physical resemblance, Bush and Camilla Parker-Bowles share no common ancestor. If she were to become Queen, he would no longer wield control over Tony Blair or any other members of Parliment. The Pope's convenient demise provides Bush with the perfect excuse to travel to Europe and dispose of any documention concerning the pontiff's plan to get the Church hip to the times. More importantly, it will allow him the opportunity to seduce Charles with a more attractive suitor - someone who is more sympathetic to Bush's plans for global domination.

Keep your eyes on the news. If Prince Charles announces his engagement to Paul Wolfowitz, then all my suspicions will be confirmed.

"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her that she died!
How shall the ritual, then, be read? The requiem how be sung?
By you - by yours, the evil eye, by yours - the slanderous tongue
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?"
- Edgar Allen Poe

A chill wind blows through Europe...a cold, whistling wind that sweeps in from the west, roars over the majestic Wienerwald and down through the Stubai Valley, then waltzes across the deep blue Danube like an incredibly stale literary device, blanketing Austria under a dark cloud of doom. There will be no sweet sounds of dog-faced children dancing joyfully around the village goat in their festive liederhosen this Easterfest. The Austrian Ring Ouzel sits silent in it's saintly perch, the Turdus no longer flowing from his feathery Torquatus. Known for its beautiful music and mustachioed women, the shiny city of Vienna founders under a deluge of tears for the fall of an angel. Once delicate lips now frozen in a rigormortic pucker, the hair on her back frozen to her kitchen floor, Baroness Lips von Lipstrill, the Whistlingest Whistler Who Ever Whistled, whistles no more.

The last of the great Austrian whistlers that once roamed the European plains in vast herds, the Baroness succombed to Bush's deadly flu plague last week. She died a lonely woman in her Vienna apartment, almost 80 years to the day after she was born a man in Czechoslovakia.

While Ray Charles and Hunter S. Thompson were given fawning eulogies across the blogosphere, the news of the Baroness' passing went greaty unnoticed, shamefully relegated to the "Tales of the Weird" section of most internet fishwrappers. But those of us who followed the Baronesses' stellar career will never forget her. From her legendary performance before the Shah of Iran, to her brief stint with Guns n' Roses, she whistled her way into our hearts like Dirofilaria Immiti through the cardiovascular system of a German Shepherd. For over 50 years, she tooted her mellifluous melodies on stage with Marlene Dietrich, Edith Piaf, and even Frank Sinatra, who was quickly seduced by the sweet song of the siren. After the Baroness performed her signature piece, Me and My Five O'Clock Shadow before a packed house, an amorous Ol' Blue Eyes once quipped: "Is it just me, or does dat broad look like Petey Lawford"?

Fare the well, fair Baroness Lips von Lipstrill! Though you were only a Baroness, you'll always be a Queen to us.